LONDON: Companies hiring more experts in artificial intelligence (AI) are seeing their stocks and bonds outperform this year, according to Barclays Plc.
The bank looked at how many job postings a firm has seeking AI experts, as opposed to AI generalists, versus the median for their sector. It then compared the level of AI expert hires to the firms’ equity and credit returns in 2026.
The result: Companies with hiring ratios below the sector average tended to underperform – those notching at least a 0.1 times differential realised a minus 19% equity return on average, and minus 0.79% excess returns in bonds.
Companies least exposed to AI disruption, or those with a hiring ratio for AI experts that is well above the sector average, outperformed.
Excess returns for credit more than 0.4 times above the sector average were minus 0.11% this year, versus minus 0.4% and minus 0.3% for the high-grade and junk bond indexes respectively.
“Expert skills are a better proxy for meaningful AI adoption,” Barclays strategists led by Dominique Toublan and Brad Elliott wrote in their note.
“Companies with below‑median expert AI hiring and low sales-per-employee ratios are identified as most vulnerable within their sectors.”
Barclays acknowledged that “this is a fairly simplistic way to analyse a nuanced topic,” adding that some companies may use enterprise level solutions for AI rather than hiring experts.
But it cited a series of companies that may be exposed to AI disruption based on their hiring patterns, including CrowdStrike Holdings Inc, Workday Inc and International Business Machines Corp.
A spokesperson for CrowdStrike said, “This report is fundamentally flawed, relying on analysis the author describes as ‘simplistic,’ distorting CrowdStrike’s AI leadership with a superficial job-posting metric that ignores our incredible fourth-quarter results driven by accelerating AI-tailwinds.”
A Workday spokesperson pointed to the fact that the Barclays equity analyst covering the company, Raimo Lenschow, has an “overweight” rating on the firm. IBM didn’t return a request for comment by press time.
The Barclays strategists determined which firms are hiring AI experts by looking at job postings that included niche keywords like “deep learning” or “pytorch,” an open source deep-learning library, while those using broader terms like “data scientist” or “machine learning” were seen as more general AI positions. — Bloomberg
